SOLDIERS, nuns, children and chavs went on parade yesterday for a riotous opening to a long weekend of Gay Pride in the city.

Thousands lined the streets for the annual parade, as the usual disco dollies and Muscle Mary's strutted their stuff on the mile-long extravaganze through the city streets, But some of the faces were new.

Soldiers in uniform walked alongside hundreds of other marchers from the lesbian, gay and transgender community, a different kind of uniform for the day.

The Army hopes to attract more recruits from the gay and lesbian community - and show it can be gay friendly.

The 10 recruits marched in the parade on the two-mile route through the city centre, watched by thousands of supporters lining the streets ten-deep.

Wearing green fatigues the volunteers, both male and female, were shoulder to shoulder with a colourful mix of transsexuals, transvestites, lesbians and gays many wearing outrageous costumes and very little else.

PINK SHRINK: Lycra shorts and army uniforms.

Muscle Men

Soldiers handed out sweets to the crowd as the Army car travelled along the route, proceeded by a float of muscle men in pink Lycra shorts blowing whistles while gyrating to pumping house music.

Warrant Officer Lutha Magloire, 39, of the Logistics Corps, was at the parade as part of the Army's Diversity Action and Recruitment Team.

Surrounded by a troupe of gay Cupids wearing silver paint and sporting feathered wings and a bow, Warrant Officer Magloire said the Army was determined to show it can be diverse.

"We don't really care what sexual orientation you are if you want to come and join us in the Army," he said.

"I'm not prepared to say if I am gay or not. The Army does not care and does not ask that question to recruits.

"Whether straight or not, it does not really matter."

Warrant Officer Magloire said the army asked for 10 recruits from the North West area to go on the march - and got more than 30 volunteers.

"There has been unbelievable support and it caused an awful lot of conversation.

"The Army reflects society and we must recruit from all sections, so if there is prejudice in society it will be in the Army also.

COCKPIT: The RAF's first foray.

Represents

"But the Army can only get better the more it represents all the community."

The service has taken part in cultural festivals before, the officer said, but this was a first for the Army taking part in a gay event.

They have also set up a stall in Manchester's famous Gay Village, and are expected to take part in more gay parades in future.

The RAF took part in today's parade for the second year running - with a float featuring the cockpit of a plane.

Only the Navy were not represented - though there were a number of marchers dressed in sailors uniforms.

It was not intended to be a snub from the senior service, officials have said - and event organisers say sailors would be warmly welcomed to join the other forces next year.

Servicemen and women were also joined by more marchers in other uniforms, including the police and fire service.

Gay showbiz star Graham Norton, also at the event, backed the Army's efforts.

PRIDE: A long weekend of celebrations.

Pink tank

He said: "I haven't seen any of the soldiers but good for them. Somebody has got a pink tank on the parade - maybe it should be the Army's."

Festival Director Claire Turner said: "I think its great the Army is coming. They're showing that they welcome gay people and the Army is something gay people can be interested in."

"We hope the Army will have more involvement next year and a float as well," she added.

Up until January 2003, the forces were legally allowed to dismiss gay and lesbian officers.

However, a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights said the ban breached people's right to a private life.

Today's march begins a three day festival also featuring arts, music and sporting events, attracting an estimated 250,000 people to the city.

Pensioners were urged to come out of the closet at the biggest gay festival in Europe yesterday, when the charity Age Concern took a stand for the first time. Age Concern estimates that a third of Britain's 3 million lesbians and gays are over 50 and were reluctant to come out when they were younger. The charity is hoping to tap into the 'often hidden population of older lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender individuals'. The Manchester Pride Festival attracts around 400,000 visitors to the city.

LONDON (AFP) - The British army joined in a gay pride march for the first time, an army spokesman said.

Troops in uniform joined the annual Gay Pride festival in Manchester, northern England, on the march through the city centre, with thousands of supporters watching from the sidelines.

The army was out to attract homosexual recruits and show it can be gay-friendly.

Soldiers gave out sweets as their float travelled along the two-mile (three-kilometre) course, following a float of muscular men in pink Lycra shorts dancing to music and blowing whistles.

"We don't really care what sexual orientation you are if you want to come and join us in the army," said Logistics Corps warrant officer Lutha Magloire, 39, part of the Army's Diversity Action and Recruitment Team.

"The army reflects society and we must recruit from all sections, so if there is prejudice in society it will be in the army also.

"But the army can only get better the more it represents all the community."

The British army has attended cultural events before, Magloire said, but this was the service's gay festival debut.

The Royal Air Force took part for a second successive year, with a float featuring a plane's cockpit.

Though several marchers were dressed in sailors' uniforms, there was no official Royal Navy representation.

Until January 2003, Britain's armed forces were legally allowed to dismiss homosexual officers.

The march kicked off a three-day festival, attracting an estimated 250,000 people to Britain's third city.

MANCHESTER, England - Ten British soldiers and members of the Royal Air Force joined thousands of gay men and women in a gay pride parade Saturday as they sought new recruits for the army.

Supporters packed 10-deep cheered on the 10 troopers — men and women who volunteered to participate — as they waved to the crowds and smiled along the two-mile route in central Manchester.

The British government lifted a ban on gays serving in the country's armed forces in 2000 after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the restriction was a violation of human rights.

Surrounded by a group of men wearing silver paint, angel wings, blond wigs and not much else, Warrant Officer Lutha Magloire said the army was there to show its support and, if possible, to sign up new recruits.

"We don't really care what sexual orientation you are if you want to come and join us in the Army," the 39-year-old soldier said. "Whether straight or not the Army does not care and does not ask that question to recruits."

The soldiers were welcomed by the more than 45,000 people who turned out for the three-day event.

"I think it's great the Army is coming," said the festival director, Claire Turner. "They're showing that they welcome gay people and the Army is something gay people can be interested in."

The Royal Air Force was there, too, with 20 people manning a float in the parade that featured a replica of airplane cockpit. It was the second consecutive year that the RAF participated.

"Gender is not the whole story of human sexuality. We're dealing with a set of components whose interrelations don't follow any preconceived paths."

Forget a simple XX or XY - what determines whether it's a boy or a girl is more puzzling than first thought. By Peter Ellingsen.

In some ways it is the most basic question of all. Are you are a man or a woman? For centuries, it seemed simple. Men had male sex organs; women had female ones. This did not do a lot for hermaphrodites, who were born with both, but science seemed to solve the impasse by coming up with a subatomic rather than surface solution: men had XY chromosomes; women had XX chromosomes.

But in the 1990s, researchers, including Melbourne's Dr Andrew Sinclair, in a study of "intersex" people - those with ambiguous genitalia - unearthed a new gene that blew the old certainty out of the water.

Their discovery that a hitherto unknown gene, SRY, was needed to start the process of "maleness" re-opened the gender puzzle. It was now no longer enough to assume that chromosomes defined gender. There was more going on, and while associate professor Sinclair, director of the Royal Children's Hospital molecular-development unit, believes biology will yield the answer, it has not happened yet.

"This is far from simple," he says. "We're just starting to understand what determines gender."

The problem is finding an indisputable dividing line between male and female. It is not the body, as intersex children make clear. One in 2000 of all births involves babies with mixed sex anatomy - often sex organs that are ambiguous - such as a phallus that looks somewhere between a penis and a clitoris, or a divided scrotum that looks more like a labia. Then there are tens of thousands of others with chromosomes that do not comply with the usual XX or XY pattern. Most have normal sex organs and only discover they are different when they try to have children. Are they male or female? The biology does not make it clear.

Melbourne woman Christie North, who was recently featured on a Four Corners program, was born with male chromosomes and testes. Her condition, known as androgen insensitivity syndrome, means her body can generate testosterone, but can't respond to it. She can't have children or menstruate, and receives injections of the female hormone oestrogen to help feminise her body. She looks like a woman and feels and acts like a woman. But if the usual formula for gender - XX or XY chromosomes - were applied she would be considered male. It is confusing. Because her body was unable to process male hormones in the womb, she developed into a female. Hers, as Four Corners noted, is one of more than a dozen intersex conditions that affect thousands of Australians.

Sinclair thinks the solution to the gender puzzle lies in the way testes develop in the embryo. But since his discovery, an answer remains elusive. Talking of the new SRY gene, he says: "We had a very simplistic notion of a linear pathway, but that is just grossly naive," he says. "Fifteen years on we still don't know how it is regulated."

Melbourne colleague, associate professor Vincent Harley, is also investigating the gender question, particularly what the new gene, SRY, might do in the brain. Dr Harley, head of human molecular genetics at Melbourne's Prince Henry's Institute of Medical Research, is trying to understand how the brain may be hard-wired differently for males and females, but does not think something as dramatic as a distinctive male and female gene will be found.

"It comes down to variations in a whole constellation of genes," he says. "I'm not suggesting there's one gene for gender, but I do think there's a biological base for gender identity. There is for everything. Trouble is you will never prove it."

Both experts are optimistic a biological key for gender will emerge, though they acknowledge that the brain's "plasticity" - the way it is hard-wired even after birth by environment - does not rule out a role for nurture. "Plasticity is important," Sinclair says.

This does not mean a return to the 1960s, when nurture was deemed decisive in arriving at the gender of intersex children. Then, spurred on by the theories of New Zealand psychiatrist Dr John Money, surgery was routinely used to assign a sex to a child with ambiguous gender, in the belief that "the psychological sex (would) agree with the haircut".

Psychology, however, is more complex. It is not just that a number of the children surgically assigned a sex grew up to identify with the opposite gender. It is - as a symposium being held in Melbourne this weekend will argue - that sexual preference tends to resist a biological explanation.

A decade ago, US researcher Dean Hamer insisted he had found a "gay" gene. If right, the claim would have provided a genetic marker for sexual desire. But it was wrong, and there are some who now think that attempts to pinpoint the biological origin of sexuality are fraught.

Dr Gary Marcus, associate professor of psychology at New York University, believes, "we're starting to see how, in forming the brain, genes make room for the environment's essential role". He sees the old nature-nurture polarity as false, saying that both interact to create the person. The brain is re-wired, both before and after birth, rather than hard-wired for all time.

Influential author and former Oxford zoologist Matt Ridley agrees. In his new book, Nature via Nurture, he talks of the line between biology and environment being blurred because of the interplay between genes and the outside world.

This is not Sinclair's field, but he senses that sexuality is just as much about "how you feel as how the brain functions". "It's very early days with this," he says.

Harley thinks sexual orientation could be like gender identity, with a complex genetic explanation, perhaps interacting with the environment. "There's stuff going on at both ends, emotions and molecules," he says.

The Royal Children's Hospital's Professor Garry Warne, who treated Christie North, admits he has "no idea" what the marker dividing men and women might be. "There are biological factors but they don't count for 100 per cent," he says. "And I have no idea of what determines sexual preference."

Dr Dany Nobus, senior lecturer in psychology at Britain's Brunel University, has spent more than a decade reviewing sexuality and believes, like the poets, it can't be boiled down to biology. He suggests the most important sexual organ lies between the ears, but not just as genetic particles.

Nobus, keynote speaker at the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis sexuality symposium today, says you have to include the unconscious. Noting that being a biological male does not automatically trigger a sense of masculinity, he says the body does not determine sexual identity. Nor, he says, does sexual orientation dictate sexual behaviour. This is partly because of the role played by unconscious fantasy.

"A homosexual man with a strong sense of femininity may have heterosexual fantasies in which he occupies the role of a male chauvinist," he says. "Gender is not the whole story of human sexuality. We're dealing with a set of components whose interrelations don't follow any preconceived paths. Human beings are neither purely the playthings of nature, nor simply followers of social forces. Reducing sexuality to nature and nurture reduces human experience."

Dr Dany Nobus will address The Ethics of the New Sexualities symposium at the Treacy Conference Centre, 126 The Avenue, Parkville, at 10am today.

Once regarded as taboo in society, Thailand’s gay population is increasingly being recognised as big spenders. A recent survey has shown that growing demand has made the market for gay products one of the hottest commercial sectors in the country. The survey, conducted by a Bangkok research company, Nano Search Co Ltd, found that in spite of the economic slowdown, sales of cosmetics, apparel and trendy mobile phones are on the rise partly because of demand from homosexual buyers.

The survey in Bangkok this year, was conducted in two phases. The first involved 220 homosexual and heterosexual respondents. The second phase involved a selected group of 300 gay men.

The results were revealed yesterday at a seminar on economic trends and impacts on purchasing power in the consumer durable goods industry, organised by GfK Marketing Services (Thailand) Ltd, the local arm of an international business and marketing surveyer.

“From our survey, we have seen tremendous potential in this gay product segment,” said Teerasak Wongpiya, a business consultant for Nano Search said. “Gay people have generated a dramatic demand for products serving this ‘rainbow gender’.”

Gay men tend to be image conscious. Moreover, they have higher purchasing power than family men because they don’t have to provide for children.

Teerasak said gay consumers enjoyed 25 per cent to 30 per cent more disposable income, on average, than heterosexuals.

On top of this, homosexuality has gained increasing acceptance from society, according to Nano Search.

“Based on our study, about 40 per cent of people say they don’t have negative feelings towards homosexuals,” Teerasak said. “Only 0.4 per cent of them dislike gays.”

Teerasak said that despite the trend, Thailand’s gay market remained untapped.

“We have not seen many businesses developing products specifically to serve this group of customers,” he said.

Phusit Phensiri, executive vice president of Nano Search Co Ltd, said that gays have power within business organisations to devise and impart creative ideas. This creative capacity matches the latest marketing strategies, which have shifted from “the customer is key” to “the idea is king”.

Gay employees, who often have distinct views on design, fashion and creativity, and are able to create better value for products of the companies they work for. This capacity has resulted in higher salaries for gay employees, Phusit said.

He added that gay workers with bachelor’s degrees often enjoy double the salary of general office workers.

Phusit said that because gays often prefer not to reveal their homosexuality, the market for gay products and services had been perceived as a “secret” market. As a result, direct marketing has become a powerful force in the gay market.

In spite of the economic slowdown, sales of cosmetics, apparel and trendy mobile phones are on the rise partly because of demand from homosexual buyers, concluded the survey conducted by the Bangkok research company Nano Search Co Ltd.

"From our survey, we have seen tremendous potential in this gayproduct segment," newspaper Nation on Thursday quoted the company's business consultant Teerasak Wongpiya as saying.

The company's survey was conducted in two phases, involving a mixed group of 220 homosexual and heterosexual respondents and 300selected gay men respectively.

Gay men tend to be more image conscious and have higher purchasing power, showed results of the survey released on Wednesday.

On average, gay consumers enjoyed 25 percent to 30 percent moredisposable income than heterosexuals, for they don't have to provide for children, said Teerasak.

The survey also found that the Thai society has adopted a more tolerant attitude toward homosexual.

"Based on our study, about 40 percent of people say they don't have negative feelings towards homosexuals," said Teerasak.

On the other hand, the business consultant in charge of the survey noticed that the gay market still an untapped sector in thekingdom.

"We have not seen many businesses developing products specifically to serve this group of customers," he said.

The Nation Party will be held in the Thai resort city of Phuket November 4 - 6 following a meeting between organizers, the Phuket governor and the mayor of the local council.

The annual party, which attracts thousands of people from around the world, was told earlier this year it was not welcome in Singapore.

For four years the Nation Party attracted thousands of gays from throughout Asia to Singapore, but earlier this year the government refused to give organizers a permit after an official linked the party to a spike in HIV/AIDS cases in the city nation.

Phuket officials instantly embraced the festival, but local residents were not so warm to the idea. (story) They cited concerns that the event may create a noise problem and thousands of gays could discourage straight families from vacationing in the area still getting over the effects of the tsunami that hit the area last December.

At a closed door meeting lat this week with Governor Udomsak Uswarangkura and Kata-Karon mayor Thawee Thongcham organizers of the Nation Party agreed to several restrictions including a 1 am closing each night.

Past Nation Parties have been all night events but the restriction means the festival will operate at the same time as other entertainment venues in the city and in Bangkok.

"Phuket has much to offer visitors in terms of hospitality and the city will work closely with the organised to ensure that the event is a successful one," said Governor Uswarangkura in a statement.

In a bid to increase the level of local participation, a working committee will be established comprising representatives from the city, the police, the hotel association and the organizers.

"Having such a large group of international visitors converge upon Phuket in November will also encourage more foreign arrivals in the following months," said Pattanapong Aikwanich, President of the Phuket Tourist Association.

As soon as the first word went out that the Nation Party would be held in the popular Thai resort people began making reservations.

Almost 80 per cent of the rooms at host hotel and party venue, Crowne Plaza Karon Beach Phuket, have already been booked.

BOSTON (Reuters) - Opponents of same-sex marriage face near-certain defeat in their bid to overturn a ruling in Massachusetts allowing gays and lesbians to wed, a result that could influence debate on the hotly contested issue across the country.

Just over a year after Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to allow gay couples to marry, political support is fading for a state constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage and allow only same-sex civil unions.

Massachusetts lawmakers vote on the proposal on September 14 in a constitutional convention. Approval would pave the way for a final hurdle -- a state referendum on the amendment in 2006. But a senior lawmaker expressed doubts it would get that far.

House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi said rejection was likely.

"At this point he thinks the way it looks now, the amendment will not proceed any further," said DiMasi spokeswoman Kim Haberlin.

DiMasi is the latest Massachusetts politician to signal dying political and public support for overturning the ground-breaking ruling by the state's highest court that struck down a ban on gay marriage as unconstitutional.

Advocates say more than 6,000 same-sex couples have been issued marriage licenses in Massachusetts.

But they see more fights ahead that could determine whether other states follow Massachusetts's lead, as conservatives and Christian groups keep pushing for an outright ban on both same-sex marriages and civil unions in the state.

Many gay rights activists oppose civil unions, which lack some of the federal benefits of a legal marriage.

IMMINENT CHALLENGE

The biggest challenge could come from a separate initiative calling for a state referendum in 2008 to ban gay marriage and not allow civil unions. The state's attorney general must decide by September 7 whether to certify or reject that.

"We believe we are on rock-solid ground," said Kristian Mineau, president of the conservative Massachusetts Family Institute that is leading the initiative.

If it gets a green light, Mineau's group would need to gather 66,000 signatures in a petition supporting the ban. Then they must win backing from at least 50 lawmakers in two legislative sessions to put it on the ballot.

That means more standoffs with activists such as Lee Swislow, executive director of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, which is circulating its own petition of lawyers that says the challenge is legally flawed.

"We think the Massachusetts Constitution says pretty plainly that you cannot use a ballot initiative process to reverse a judicial decision. So we think we have a pretty strong argument," said Swislow.

Among her more powerful supporters is the head of the Boston Bar Association, Ellen Carpenter, who joined about 80 other lawyers in signing the petition before sending it the attorney general with nearly 50 pages of supporting documents.

"As far as I understand it, the provision cannot be amended to overturn a supreme judicial decision," Carpenter said. "And that letter is signed by real heavy hitters in the Boston and Massachusetts legal community."

But for some gay couples, like 37-year-old Amy Wyeth and her long-term partner Valerie who plan to marry in November, the frenzied debate is not enough to sway their wedding plans.

"It's been amazing to me that I have not encountered any prejudice or problems," said Wyeth, although she expressed some concern over the risk of the laws being reversed.

"It concerns me, but I also think that once psychologically you have something in place, it's harder to take that away."